Case Study: Portal speeds up transactions

Computer reseller Panacea has grown very quickly over the past 10 years, and is now one of the larger resellers. As it grew it found its sales staff had to spend a lot of their time searching for information about the pricing and availability of products.

Panacea's staff were making a lot of calls to suppliers to get simple information. Some of this information was available online. However, because there is no standard format for Web sites, searching for data could be very time consuming.

To help improve customer service, the company decided to set up a more efficient online system for information gathering. Panacea wanted a system that could link its sales staff to suppliers' inventory and pricing information.

After looking at a number of different packages, Panacea decided to build a procurement portal using technology from UK-based supply chain automation specialist Igentica.

Adrian Shaw, support services manager at Panacea, says that as well as e-procurement features such as real-time cat- alogue integration, the portal had to offer content management capabilities. Igentica and Panacea agreed to set up an integrated real-time catalogue system as the first phase of implementation.

Shaw says the system has proved extremely useful. "It is used by our sales staff all day, every day, and gives us real benefits," he says.

"We need to get multiple prices from different suppliers. Now we have the ability to see who has what and how many they have, as well as when you could get them. Before we had to call round all of the suppliers and that would take about 15 minutes. The sales people can take as many as 20 calls a day; when your time is used to get basic product information you just don't have time to add any value for the customer."

Panacea had to encourage its suppliers to connect to the procurement portal. "We told them that we would be using some software, and if they went on to it they would be in the frame for all orders," Shaw says. "They invested the money, we did the Web site, and it is now on our browser."

Nick Kandola, chief executive of Igentica, adds, "We try to work with the reseller and their suppliers at the same time. We ask the suppliers to stick to an XML format, and we will offer advice on how to do this."

Kandola says the system is designed to be very easy to use. "You can input a key item number, use that to contact suppliers and distributors to find out stock numbers and pricing," explains Kandola. "We extended this to include batch lists so that companies can send spreadsheets with their orders on them. Customers can upload the details to the portal, and then the reseller, in this case Panacea, can bring back results as quickly as possible."

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SUMMARY
Business need: IT reseller Panacea needed to respond more quickly and provide better information to its customers. It also needed better online links with distributors.

Technical considerations: The system had to be accessed via a standard browser, and run with Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and Microsoft XML 4.0.

Solution: The firm set up a portal linked to its suppliers to provide faster and easier access to price, product and stock information.